The Internet and many other sources and applications now provide a vast array of streaming and fixed media or other content for listening, viewing, processing, storing and otherwise rendering. However, currently there is no practical way of capturing, recording or rendering the streaming or fixed media or content in a copy-protected manner so that a pirate cannot tap into the stream at some point along the pipeline, either as the content is being processed or as the content is being rendered, and take possession of a copy of or alter the content. This problem has existed in connection with other media rendering and recording devices in the past, e.g., VCRs for television content, or tape recorders for audio signals, but with at least one key difference. Since digital media content can be recorded with virtually no signal loss, this poses a “risk” for copyright owners that their works will be freely shared (pirated) without compensation. With VCRs and tape recorders, the device(s) and transmission media invite noise or corruption of data into the recording process. With streaming or fixed digital media, there is no reason why virtually lossless conversions and re-transmissions cannot be effected, at least to the limits of human ear and eye capabilities, and there is no reason why unadulterated digital data cannot be stored and freely distributed. Thus, it would be desirable to prevent unfettered re-distribution of digital data because there is little difference between what copyright owners can provide for a fee and what a pirate can provide for free. Moreover, with respect to communications that are desired to be confidential, such as e-commerce transactions, it is important to the user engaged in the dialog that no unauthorized third party be privy to the transactions. Thus, with respect to content from a trusted source, there is currently no practical way for the data to be “securely” processed or rendered on a user's computer without preventing piracy, or corruption.
In particular, once the content is pipelined among a host computing system, one or more graphics processing units (GPUs), and a rendering device, e.g., a monitor, there are a number of opportunities for a pirate or other unauthorized third party to camp on a line or signal, and either pirate or corrupt the signal. Moreover, as user dialogs become more sophisticated via messaging services and video teleconferencing, providing a trusted pipeline for secure content from wherever originated becomes all the more important moving forward.
Furthermore, it is clear that future generations of operating systems, computing devices and applications will utilize more computing power from the GPUs for business applications, as opposed to drawing most computing power from the CPUs as in today's personal computers (PCs). Thus, ensuring that content that is sent to the GPUs via “trusted graphics” applications will be a fundamental feature for future computing devices, and one not addressed adequately by present computing systems.
This problem of providing a secure pipeline for trusted content can be thought of as being twofold: (1) one must ensure that the trusted content cannot be copied or viewed at some weak point during the pipeline (confidentiality) and (2) one must ensure that the pipeline prevents unauthorized corruption of data in the pipeline (protected). In the context of system security, complexity is a liability because it makes it more difficult to prove a system's security. As with an airport or other security scenario, the more entry and exit points there are in the system, the more difficult it becomes to ensure security. In this regard, presently there is no means by which the bulk of GPU functionality and the display driver(s) can be trusted in terms of both confidentiality and protectability. Thus, it would be desirable to implement a trusted graphics environment in connection with a computing device which receives content from a trusted source, such that a user of the device can be assured that the content cannot be copied without authorization and cannot be tampered or altered by a third party.